


Becoming

by jujubiest



Series: Becoming [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cannibalism, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 09:07:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4954543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jujubiest/pseuds/jujubiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He saw Hannibal long before this. Knew him, intimately. But he has never felt him so close as he does in this moment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Becoming

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Eriakit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eriakit/gifts).



> See the end for a warning that serves as a spoiler.

Will smiles across the table as Hannibal takes the first bite. He chews slowly, savoring. It’s the first dish Will has prepared for them, under Hannibal’s guiding gaze but mostly on his own power. From farm to table, as it were. The presentation is beautiful—that part alone he left to Hannibal to decide, following the instructions he was given to create the masterpiece before them. Will’s talent now lies in efficiency of action and clarity of purpose. For all his powers of imagination, Hannibal is still the culinary artist between them.

He slices off a bite-sized piece of the meat for himself, lifts it slowly to his lips. His silent companion is watching his face, waiting. The meat is tender, melts like butter on his tongue. The flavor is subtle, smoky with the barest hint of salt. Will’s eyes never leave Hannibal’s as he tastes, chews, swallows.

Hannibal’s smile echoes his own.

This is their design.

* * *

“This is how I always imagined it,” Will says softly, one night over dinner. “Us. If I had gone with you that night. Like I was supposed to.”

Hannibal’s smile is sad. Their meals are lavish, their enjoyment of them protracted. Their conversations are sparse and short, but weighty with meaning. Much of what is understood lives in the silences between what is said, in looks cast across laden tables.

“Much of what could have been is forever lost,” he says at last in his lilting, accented English. “But it is not all completely irretrievable.”

“Most of what could have been belongs to the dead.” Hannibal is still the romantic; Will is as stoic and unimpressed with it as ever.

“Yet even the dead may return to us, in dreams. In our hearts, and memories.”

“I’m here,” Will says. “So are you. That’s enough for now.”

There is more he could want, if he allowed himself greed. But he also knows well enough now that life with Hannibal does not abide greed, or distractions. The empty spaces between them serve as a buffer, a safety zone to prevent either from losing himself completely to the caprices of the other—Will to Hannibal’s cruelest predilections, Hannibal to Will’s noble ones.

Whether out of love or simply incautiousness, the danger is always there. To wish for another to fill that emptiness is to betray both what he has and what he wants all at once, he knows that now. Death, violence: Will can handle these in spades, dealing them like cards to others or witnessing them from a sound-dampening, innocuous distance. But he has had more than enough loss for one lifetime.

This is the place Hannibal prepared for him, for both of them. He will endeavor to be content with it.

* * *

Sometimes there are too many ghosts between them; Will feels as though he sees and speaks to Hannibal through a cold, clotted fog of them. They obscure the essential truth of him, cloud Will’s perception of him with an anger that has no point, no solution.

Beverly is dead. Abigail is dead. The Will Graham that was is dead as far as the world knows, his memory buried by his few friends, his sweet-faced wife and her son. The specters of his former life appear to him, beautiful weightless dreams. He tries to forget them. They have no place in his life now, and there is no place for him among them.

His place is with Hannibal. Their stars are the same. They view each other through a fog of past betrayals, but it’s the fog, not Hannibal, that fills Will’s belly with an aching emptiness. The sight of Hannibal himself is the only cure for that ache.

But on occasion Will’s penchant for punishing the guilty rears its ugly head here, in their home where it should be at rest. Sometimes the ghosts sleep and he calls them up by choice, parades them before this man he loves, and wants, and needs, and hates. Flaunts the wounds they’ve given one another, battling for the bragging right of the martyr in their twisted love story. He knows it’s sick. But Hannibal bears it in truculent silence, refusing to indulge Will’s pettiness with reminders and recriminations of his own.

After a while the taunts and accusations stick in his maw like a splintered bone sliding under the gums. After a while he begs the ghosts to rest, so he can return to the clear-eyed understanding—a corner of his mind whispers  _adoration—_ they owe one another.

* * *

One day he opens a freezer and finds a single, sealed, air-tight package left. It feels heavy in his hands as he takes it from the shelf, heavy as he carries it to the kitchen to begin the preparations for their evening meal.

Hannibal leans against the counter as he works, watching him silently. He has long-since given over the responsibilities of the kitchen to Will, no longer needing to offer instruction, or even advice. He seems to enjoy just watching him work, and Will indulges him in this as he does in so many things.

Time seems to warp, too fast and then too slow. He washes the meat, trims it meticulously, and butterflies it down the center to make it lie flat. Both sides are seasoned lightly with salt, pepper, olive oil, sage. He rubs the spices in vigorously, massaging the meat with both hands, places it flat in a hot pan with a cooking brick on top.

Hannibal’s eyes follow his every move hungrily.

He removes it from the pan when it reaches the right temperature, and allows it to rest before slicing it thin. He plates it carefully, arranged alone in the center. This particular cut of meat neither needs nor deserves accompaniment.

When he brings it to the table, Hannibal is already seated. Will joins him and smiles tightly across a table that suddenly seems too long.

“When your work here is finished, what will you do?”

Will looks down at the plate as he answers, unsure he will be able to speak if he meets Hannibal’s eyes.

“I’ve gone too far to turn back. You are leaving me alone in the darkness.”

“I will not leave you if you do not wish it, Will. No one can take me from you without your consent.”

Will looks up at that, his face a mask of pain.

“Didn’t I give consent? Isn’t that what I did when…when I—“ He can’t bring himself to put it into words, even now.

“You made a choice, and bore the consequences. Faced with the impossibility of keeping me and the pain of losing me, you found a way to keep me that could satisfy your conscience.”

“Nothing about this satisfies my conscience,” Will says, voice dark with anger and a maudlin sort of irony.

“Nevertheless, you found a way to keep me. I assure you, I would have found it one of many preferable outcomes to losing you forever.”

Will closes his eyes against those words, the implied forgiveness of them. He doesn’t want it.

What he wants is to be done.

He forces himself to open his eyes, to look at the man across the table. The man who first made him feel what it meant to be seen. The man who loved parts of himself he couldn’t even acknowledge.

He takes a thin slice of meat onto his fork, lifts it gingerly to his lips and then slips it inside. Tastes. Chews. Swallows.

“Tell me Will,” says Hannibal. “Does my heart satisfy you?”

Will smiles across the table.

“Your heart satisfies me like nothing else ever did, or could,” he says frankly, without artifice.

He lifts another tender piece of meat onto his fork. He saw Hannibal long before this. Knew him, intimately. But he has never felt him so close as he does in this moment. Has never absorbed another person’s soul into his own mind with such a warm sensation of welcome.

He lingers over this last meal, savoring every bite.

This is his becoming.

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: major character death (occurs prior to fic).


End file.
